The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

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The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by GeorgeC » June 1st, 2011, 12:16 pm

A reboot is about the last thing DC Comics needs now.

They're tried this with Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis.... well, you get the picture!

The DC head officers (Geoff Johns and Jim Lee) were involved with the last two reboots. As bad as Zero Hour was and as hopelessly confused and unravelled as Crisis on Infinite Earths left DC continuity, the latter two series made the first two seem like well-planned, well-oiled classics!

Rebooting the titles at #1 is, at best, a temporary stop-gap and sales will fall back to usual levels after a very short while. IF the reboot ticks off enough people, sales WILL definitely fall. There may be a six-month uptick at best but after a year sales will be where they were before if not lower.

What's more troubling to comic shops is releasing digital versions of the comics day-and-date with the print copies. This has the potential to do NOTHING to print sales if the digital price is still too high (who will pay $3 for online copies if it's the same at the shop???) or devastate the already fragile market. It's not in great shape.... Sales ARE down. Lowest, historically... and it's not just the economy, stupid. Day-in, day-out --- there's little to recommend and ironically as more characters get exposure in live-action the comic series have never been in worse shape across the board. More than a few titles saw their best sales and writing decades ago. A lot of crappy stories are getting collected just to sell trades because people do NOT want to pay for $3-$4 monthly installlments of a 6-8 part story. The trades are cheaper...

Redesigning the characters or promising "more diversity" with "backstories retold for a new audience" won't work, either. The characters are already iconic and it makes little sense changing their histories for a bunch of kids who will NEVER read the comics. Where's the jump-on point for ANY 7-12 year-old with these characters??? There isn't any beyond the animated series which are adapting stories are that are already 20-40 old years vintage! Trust me, very few of the kids who grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series actually got into buying the monthly comics with that character. For that matter, the monthly Batman animated comic tie-in was never a best-seller in the English-speaking world, period...

Redesigning the costumes after 60+ years makes little sense, too. If anything, the Jim Lee redesigns I've seen for the characters LOOK UGLY!!!! Shoulda learned from Wildstorm, DC.... How many of those Jim Lee character designs were memorable????

(Jim Lee, btw, was behind the the most recently panned Wonder Woman redesign. The one that made her look like a Hollywood callgirl. Nice to see he hasn't learned anything from that. He's also a bit too fond of V-collars and other distractingly unneccessary fluff in the outfits, too.)

My take on this....

The experiment is doomed to fail unless it's really well thought out (doubtful) and it will only drive away more long-time DC readers. Believe it or not, most of them are fed up with the Crisis/reboot nonsense.
This short-term nonsense will blow over in a few years at most --- perhaps less.

I don't honestly think Jim Lee and Geoff Johns are going to be creative officers at DC for much longer if there isn't any improvement in sales, period. DC is no longer isolated from the rest of WB and the sales figures are being looked at more closely than at any time prior to DC being bought by WB in the mid-1970s. Dan Didio, the other DC creative head who's utterly clueless, has pretty much proven he's teflon like it or not. The other two guys have much higher stakes in the outcome of this event... I can guarantee better than 50% the fallout will NOT be pretty. My conservative guess is 70-80% unless by some miracle this has really been well thought -- which it hasn't been. A reboot wouldn't be happening if anybody had really been thinking through things clearly.

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Re: The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by droosan » June 1st, 2011, 3:31 pm

DC lost me as a 'loyal' reader way back when they did the first Crisis on Infinite Earths in the 1980's.

Gorgeous though George Perez' artwork was, the fact remained that the universe reboot and 'streamlining' caused more story problems than it solved. Not to mention that several of my favorite characters at that time were effectively written out-of-existence. Re-starting most of their books with a 'new #1' was likewise pretty pointless. :|

I saw it as more of a convenient 'jumping-off' point, than the 'jumping-on' point they'd declared it to be.

Fortunately for me, the mid-1980's was something of a 'golden age' for independent comic book publishers .. and most of them offered a much wider variety of stories and art than just super-heroics.

But comic books were quite a bit cheaper and more widely 'available' then than they are now. If enough of DC's current readership 'jumps-off' at this point, they're a bit more likely to jump-off comic books for good. :?

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Post by Ben » June 1st, 2011, 3:37 pm

Seems to me the reasoning behind this is that they've run out of story avenues. This way, they can basically retell 75 years' worth of stories with updated visuals (and maybe fix a few clunkers along the way). With sales down, they'll want to be cutting costs, so basically taking existing material - like the DC Universe animated movies - and putting it out again under a new guise probably means that they can serve up something "new" while still getting more mileage out of existing work.

I don't agree with it, but that's what it feels like. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't mix and match chronologies so that they can focus on the better stories in any characters' series, or even alternate universe stories. Just feels like a way they can regurgitate the best of the past in a new-look linear fashion. Personally, I would probably prefer reprints of classic material, put out on a regular basis.

Over here they had a long-running music chart show called Top Of The Pops and they've started running that again from the original 1976 tapes, one a week, in the same time-slot on the comparative date (so tomorrow evening we'll have June 2nd's show from '76). It's a really cool way to see old stuff that is "new" to lots of people, and in a way it would be cooler to be able to collect the old reprints instead of those same stories re-done over again (and probably not as good).

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Re: The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by ohmahaaha » June 1st, 2011, 6:41 pm

Just another big gimmick from the comics industry. The thing I don't like about "reboots" is that IMO the creators are being lazy about a major portion of the creative process: they don't really have to think up new villains and plotlines, they just have to "re-imagine" them. If these writers and artists were truly good enough, I think they would be able to just come up with new plots and stories that fit within the established continuity. I ain't buyin' - I'd just as soon re-read my old back issues and Archives/Showcase presents and be faithful the the mythology, continuity & universe that I know.

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Re: The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by Randall » June 1st, 2011, 8:49 pm

There is little doubt that DC is desperate. Even their decent sellers have fallen to 15-40,000 copies, and their best sellers can't crack 100k. This is a make-it-or-break it move on their part.

It is not necessarily a bad idea. (But read on...)

The first Crisis made more problems because they didn't follow Marv Wolfman's advice to reboot the whole line at once. Instead, they ended up with a patchwork continuity that didn't work. Fans got tired of dealing with the fixes, and the endless reboots kept coming. All DC fans know this already.

Still, the post-Crisis period was really a bit of a golden age there as far as talent on their big books--- Byrne/Wolfman/Ordway's Superman, Perez's Wonder Woman, Miller's and Barr's Batman, Grell's Green Arrow, Truman and later Ostrander's Hawkworld, etc. Those were some great comics, except for fussing with continuity patches.

Infinite Crisis had a great run-up, and promised better things to come, but the promise went unfulfilled. Characters kept being killed off, stories remained dark, and led into DC's zombie-type storyline. I lost interest by then.
I've dropped nearly all my DC comics, after many years of enjoying them to varying degrees. Now I just get a couple of fringe books, and instead check out stuff from other publishers.

Now, with the line-wide reboot, they have a great opportunity to do things right. The problem is that the people steering this initiative are largely the same ones who made the books I didn't like the past few years. Still, some good may come of this. Grant Morrison on Superman should be interesting, for example. I look forward to hearing who else they'll have working on titles. I may even check a few of them out. But these haven't seemed like the same characters I once loved for some time now. And I doubt new readers are out there in sufficient numbers to make this worthwhile.

Still, I'll withold final judgment. The new books will all be announced in 2 weeks, and a few days later I will be at a DC Nation panel in Calgary to listen to Eddie Berganza answer questions. It's quite fortuitous that Calgary is one of the first cons next on the schedule (as well as Philly's), so I'm looking forward to it.

The line-wide day-and-date digital issue may be even a bigger story in some respects. This move potentially threatens the entire retail community. It makes sense for finding readers not near comic shops (and there are many of those), but how many regular browsers will be lost to the stores? Though, DC is rolling out a plan to share digital sales with retailers; not sure yet how well that will work, though.

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » June 2nd, 2011, 12:20 am

I love a bunch of the Marvel and DC characters... There's around 20 from each company that are among my favorite fictional characters, period.

See, I love the mythos of a bunch of these guys -- Flash, Superman, Green Lantern, Batman, the Avengers, FF, JLA, and so on. The origins and major storylines are modern versions of what's been done before in Greek, Roman, Hindu, Shinto, etc. mythologies and religious folklore. Failure in adaptations to other media has solely been in the lap of the people doing the adaptations, NOT the characters or their basic premises. The more faithful adaptations that were actually good films have become classics and withstood the test of time. About half the animated DC adaptations since the early 1990s fit into "classic" with maybe 3 live-action films, tops.

(Yeah, still not sold on many of films post-1989 being great live-action adaptations.... They still look and feel largely like bigger budget TV films of the week. Adaptations, by and large, still aren't much more faithful than The Incredible Hulk TV series was...)

What I've never cared for is the constant retelling of the same stories over and over again in the media (comics) where the characters developed in the first place. I make no bones of the fact that I think editorial on the whole has been clueless at both companies for over 20 years now AND that the wrong people are in charge at the moment. As bad as I think the Quesada regime was at Marvel, the guys in charge at DC now are a disaster in the making.... as if Didio alone weren't bad enough.

As someone who grew up with the original Spider-Man animated series in the 1970s and the newer shows in the early 1980s, it was a surprise to read reprints of the original Ditko/Lee run of The Amazing Spider-Man in the 1980s and find out that the first 41 Spider-Man comics were being told again and again and again and again... When I was reading Amazing Spider-Man in the 1980s, there were storylines in progress where it was very easy to see they were just updating villains with new looks and redoing old storylines -- otherwise, it was same old, same not-so-new. Sad to see the pattern didn't just exist with Spidey. ALL the characters are like this to an extent. Yes, everybody's going to have their favorite characters, creators, and runs but there are basic storylines that are iconic and they get repeated again and again to infinity.

The DC reboot won't address this basic problem of repetition and all the errors that creep in because people in charge (who are SUPPOSED to be editing!) aren't paying attention to what's happening in the storylines... Like Ben elegantly said (paraphrasing), "It's a new coat of paint on the same old house!"

********

On the other hand, Droo's right. There's still occasionally good, original work being done outside of Marvel and DC who don't want to bother with new creators if they can't own potential money-making characters outright. There are plenty of stories beyond Siegel and Shuster of people being robbed of royalties because old contracts were never given over to said-creators to be signed when they were asked for OR mysteriously "got lost in the moving" of DC/Marvel headquarters.

The careers of a few people have started with oddball characters like The Tick and Earthworm Jim who DIDN'T have the Marvel or DC logos on comics or videogames...

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Post by Randall » June 2nd, 2011, 12:29 am

I am so tired of seeing the same stories told over and over again. This was OK when the readership changed over every 5-7 years, but in today's market they must know that most of us have seen these stories before, and wouldn't mind seeing newer stories. And, with so many great reprints out there, even newer fans have easy access to the originals--- so why bother telling the same stories yet again?!

Lately, I've been reading lots of reprint books. Why bother with version 7 of a story when you can see Gardner Fox or Stan Lee do it the first time?

That said, if DC can hire new writers, they might have a chance, but I'm afraid that even then the editors will screw things up. Stories these days come from editorial too often, and DC's editors just don't seem very good.

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Re: The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by GeorgeC » June 2nd, 2011, 5:43 am

Yeah,

DC's never had good editorialship in all the time I've been reading comics.
Historically -- and this goes by what I've read about the beginning of DC through the present --, the DC line has been separated into distinct editorial zones. They really amount to feudal zones with one editor controlling Superman titles, another Batman, another Flash, another Green Lantern, another Wonder Woman, JLA, etc.

There's been no overall group editor for the most part and the lack of coordination and talking has led to a lot of the problems that exist in DC continuity. It also doesn't help that DC has bought out characters (the original Captain Marvel, Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, The Question, Blackhawk, Plastic Man) from at least a half-dozen companies that had no connection to its own lines, either. For all the talk about straightening things out, the DC officers and creators just could NOT get on the same page and ever carry through with a single unified vision for any length of time. Some of it's history -- the Byrne Superman reboot did away with too much critical history (can we say Superboy???) to last forever --, other parts are the personality politics that have plagued that company since the beginning. Julius Schwartz literally had to pull Mort Weisinger's (longest-serving Superman editor) teeth to be able to use Superman in JLA in the late 1950s/early 1960s!

Marvel Comics had the fortune that for many years the single editor WAS Stan Lee. When Marvel truly began, in late 1961, there were really only 3 characters from the company's earlier incarnations (Timely and Atlas) that were worth reviving -- Captain America, The Sub-Mariner, and The Human Torch. Stan bucked the idea of rebooting those characters right away -- in essence copying the JLA directly with Marvel's best-known characters at the time -- and basically created a new universe from scratch with a lot of help from his staff artists and occasional writing assistance from his kid brother. He brought back the most unique Golden Age "Marvel" characters in major subplots for the fourth issues of The Fantastic Four (Namor) and Avengers (Captain America). The original Human Torch was never fully revived during Stan's tenure and has only sporadically popped up when some artist or writer had a use for the character otherwise the character was retooled as Johnny Storm in the FF.

But yeah, Marvel's the way it is because for the critical era of that company in the 1960s it was possible to create a unified vision... and it remained that way until roughly the mid-1990s. Stan's successors up until the 1990s took the unified vision seriously. THAT'S when Marvel became about as half-screwed up (at least on the X-Men side!) as DC's generally been for at least 30-some years now...

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Post by Dusterian » June 6th, 2011, 5:54 pm

I'm not someone who really follows comics at all, I am merely coming in here because this is so huge and interests me. And who knows, you may like my opinion.

It seems very clear to me that this is obviously a gimmick, but also, perhaps, an "alternative" look at the characters, one which will allow something more unified and continuous. Almost like a cleaning up of everything, for new or casual readers who don't care about getting all the many, many, many, many stories about every Super Hero out there.

I think that a nice, "touched up"/"perfected" (and I use that term loosely) version of all the original, best, and most important stories would be cool to have just for the sake of collector's edition coolness. Keeping they're original costumes, backstories, and who they are, but with more impressive art and perhaps better/tighter writing and action and emotion. Taking all the best, improving or getting rid of the bad.

But what they're actually doing, while sounding cool at first, just isn't good in principle. If it's re-writing and re-designing the histories of all the Super Heroes, it's a horrible thing, because to treat these characters like real people, you can't go changing who they are! If they were born in the 50's or helped with WW II, or liked a certain costume, then that's them!
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Re: The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by Dacey » June 6th, 2011, 6:10 pm

It could also be an oh-so-easy way for them to "get rid" of the plot threads that they didn't like. Some of the writers were apparently sick of Lois Lane and Superman being married, but that's no longer going to be a concern for them now.

But I'm just not sure if these characters will fit that well into "our time period," especially a patriotic character like Superman. Can someone who fights for "Truth, Justice and the American Way" really find a good origin story in these post 9/11 days of our's? For some reason I doubt it.

At the end of the day, it just seems lazy to me. Like DC Comics either got tired of what they were doing, or that they wanted to make it easier for the writers to keep track of everything without all of that icky sticky backstory stuff to deal with. But given the fan outrage that happened when Spider-Man pulled this off a few years ago, I'm a little surprised that DC Comics would be so bold as to do this!

Btw, I'm by no means a "comic book expert," so if there are any flaws in that post...well, that's the reason. ;)
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."

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Re: The DC Comics Reboot -- A COLOSSAL JOKE...

Post by Randall » June 6th, 2011, 8:39 pm

DC has backtracked a bit, saying that this will not be a line-wide "reboot." It appears that some characters will not be changed too much. Dick Grayson (current Batman and former Robin) will be Nightwing again, while Damien Wayne will continue to be the modern Robin.

Meanwhile, other characters (like Firestorm) may get new starts by the look of things. Details are still coming out.

This looks more like a post-Crisis partial reboot at this point, which could just cause even more of a mess. I remain very curious about how this all goes. I hope they know what they're doing, but DC editorial doesn't inspire confidence.

To me, this is an initiative to try and get new readers, which is good; but it may leave older readers unsatisfied. The main issue is whether stories will be good. I've tired of worrying about continuity at this point. However, like Dusty said, if you keep changin' the characters, you start to stop caring about them.

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Re:

Post by Ben » June 7th, 2011, 3:50 pm

Dusterian wrote:And who knows, you may like my opinion.
It doesn't matter if we like (or even agree with) your opinion Dusty. It's just important that you make it. (And even more important that, if someone disagrees, you let them.) :)


As I already said, this does feel like a way to wipe the slate clean and "start again" so as to clear away any continuity issues. But as you and Rand say, this can also go against things, creating more continuity gaffs or attempts to "fix" things, and changing the characters' origins and, therefore, purpose, which Dacey picks up on in then having the problem of making them relevant to today's world. Not only, if you change the characters, do you stop caring about them, but if they're not careful they'll change what we loved about a good many of them in the first place too.

I haven't followed the trials and tribulations of Marvel and DC too closely lately, but it does seem the bottom line is that comics have been lost to other media in a generalized form. I think a return to core values is what's needed...not an attempt to redress what's been told many different ways already. But I do think the way to approach Superman, for instance, is to not place him in a terrorist-occupied world. Like in WWII, they couldn't really have him fly over Germany and take out Hitler, and that rings true today. The situation is there in real life, and we deal with it. Superman is a fantasy (whatever Marlon Brando says!) and exists in a fantasy, ideal version of our world. He needs to exist there not only to be entertaining but also to be the character he is: it's no good making turning him into a character of our time, since that just opens a can of worms.

I'll likely not pick up any of the new comics, but I'm sure interested to hear what others think of them.

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Post by Dusterian » June 8th, 2011, 2:57 pm

I thought Marlon Brando was actually against taking Superman seriously, and Christopher Reeves had to talk him into it? So when did Brando say Superman was realistic?

I always thought the Super Heros were supposed to be on the realistic side, just something fantasy plopped into the real world. I mean, Christopher Nolan's recent Batman movies showed to me that people think of these characters as possible to exist in the real world. They live in cities that could exist and talk about things that do exist in the real world.

I know Spiderman had a comic where he felt less of a hero to the firefighters that saved people in 9/11 for instance.

I know who the characters are isn't supposed to change but I also thought they kept living young because of their super powers or the succession of new men after they died, so they could live in today's world. But now that I know the non-supernatural/non-immortal Bruce Wayne isn't Batman these days I find that really weird...
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Post by Ben » June 8th, 2011, 3:08 pm

Go watch Superman: The Movie again, and listen for its very first line. And, it's Reeve, by the way.

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Post by Dusterian » June 10th, 2011, 11:37 pm

Oh, Reeve. And I actually still need to see that movie in its entirety...
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